War and Peace has been in the news lately, so what was it that Leo wrote about all happy families being alike? Tolstoy came to mind last week right here in Gstaad when I encountered probably the worst-looking family I’ve ever had the bad luck to run into in the past 79 years. I wonder if Count Tolstoy ever considered writing a saga about how ugly families are all different in their ugliness. It was early evening when I walked ...
This is a certainty: Donald Trump would be the next chancellor if he were running for office in Germany. Mass assaults on German women by recently arrived Muslim Arabs have finally managed to change even the inherited-guilt German mind. Let's take it from the top: Germany took in more than a million Muslims last August and September, and continues to do so following Angela Merkel's reckless policy of open borders and generous ...
Okay, sports fans, what do Dame Vivien Duffield and Evelyn Waugh have in common? The answer is absolutely nothing, but why start 2016 with a dumb question such as this one? Waugh was short and round and so is Vivien, but except for height and weight there are no similarities. So why ask? Easy. I was reading about a dinner party Waugh gave for Clare Luce in November of 1949 at the Hyde Park Hotel. He later wrote to Nancy Mitford ...
Here's some more good stuff from the "academy" to get 2016 really rolling. It concerns Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder who left an Oxford University college more than 50 million big ones in today's money with the following stipulation: "No student should be qualified or disqualified for election to a scholarship on account of his race or religious opinion." This was back in the ...
2016 will be a hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year that the greatest Greek writer since Homer will turn 80, but we won"t mention this fact for quite a while yet. Our world is so stuck in reverse that a stabbed woman in Miami during the Art Basel shindig who was bleeding and begging for help was mistaken for "art" and ignored. The woman survived, but will art? Conceptual art must be the ...
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The week between Christmas and New Year's is a long one, recovery time for many of us. The silliest newspaper in the world, The New York Times, uses it to slip in some propaganda posing as news, but that's not news for most of us, is it? The Times is first and foremost anti-Christian, anti-normalcy, anti-white, anti-American, and anti-family. It's also very anti-military, or as the case may be, anti-SEAL. ...
Have we ever needed Christianity more than today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be okay. This was during the bombing by the Allies on Tatoi, the military airfield where the Germans concentrated their antiaircraft guns near ...
Who said that African-Americans lack initiative? It was obviously a fool, and a racist to boot. White folks never came up with terrific initiatives such as speech codes, political correctness, and boycotting speakers you don"t like. Well, maybe some white folks did, mostly Jewish intellectuals on the far left. But our black brethren sure caught up fast. They now control more than three dozen American campuses, disrupting ...
Things turn very frivolous around this time of year. Barf-inducing parties by pop culture schlock merchants selling their wares are a nightly transgression, the hacks duly reporting the shenanigans of doped-up rappers the next day as once upon a time they detailed the haut monde. London isn’t much better. Last week, at the British Fashion Awards, a designer by the name of Jonathan Anderson said that he was “honored to be on ...
What does one do, go to or refuse a party after a tragic event such as the recent Paris outrage? My son happens to live next to the Place de la République, where the massacre of innocents by those nice Islamists showing off their manhood took place. He was having dinner with his two little children when the shooting started. Luckily they’re all okay, but I spent a couple of terrible hours trying to get through after the news ...
Blind is an indie movie with an original screenplay by John Buffalo Mailer and directed by his older brother Michael Mailer. It stars Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore, and the cast includes yours truly. Personal feelings aside, and from all reports and rushes, this is going to be a really good one. Alec Baldwin is an old pro at this game, and his advice has been immeasurable and very much appreciated. I’ve never seen a more ...
Leave it to the egregious New York Times to run an editorial three days after the Paris massacres defending the so-called refugees. They are not refugees but migrants, and economic migrants at that. The newspaper that only prints what its politically correct agenda allows called refusing refugees in Europe's overcrowded lands "morally unacceptable." As morally unacceptable, I suppose, as the Times" highly paid ...
Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, said Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until his quip about spaghetti. I read this somewhere, as I’ve never used social media—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—and hope never to. Why would I, unless I wanted to make trouble for myself? Not everyone needs to know what you’re doing all of the time. Or anytime, for that matter. They say the most destructive four-letter ...
I have finally moved into my new flat, a jewel of a place in a pre–World War I Park Avenue building. The finishing touches won’t be finalized until Christmas 2016, as work is not permitted except for the two summer months. This is the way it should be. The past three years were agony for me while I lived in an apartment that shook all day while Jeff Koons, a so-called artist, put up a behemoth in the shape of a house ...
A few years back I was spending the weekend with the designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife, and they took me along to dinner at a neighbor's on Saturday night. We were in rural Connecticut, and the scene and the house we visited were straight out of a Norman Rockwell illustration. The dinner party consisted of about twelve people, and my hosts were Dr. Henry and Nancy Kissinger. The wonderfully hospitable Nancy seated me one ...
To Cleveland, Ohio, where mid-America’s middle class begins its great Midwest sprawl. I always wanted to visit Cleveland because the so-called sophisticates have poked fun at it. And the place does not disappoint. Beautiful municipal buildings of Fascist Roman style line the shores of Lake Erie, public libraries, city halls, opera houses, large public spaces, you get my drift. The people are friendly, unlike the aggressive ...
